Adventures with Holly & Bryan

“So how do we find the guide?” I asked carefully in Spanish.

“Everyone knows Dos Lolos. Just ask for Dos Lolos when you get close to Caño Negro. I’ve told the guide you’ll be there in an hour.”

I slid into the passenger seat and keyed Caño Negro into the GPS as Bryan coaxed the SUV down the bumpy driveway. We were staying here, on a farm in Costa Rica, for our honeymoon. Our hosts had helped us arrange a visit to the Caño Negro wildlife refuge, and we couldn’t be more excited. There was just the problem of finding our guide. We’d need to go with a guide, because Caño Negro was a giant swamp, and we didn’t have a boat.

“So, the GPS says it’ll take an hour and fifteen minutes to get there, but Alejandro called ahead to the guide and told him we’ll be there in an hour.”

There wasn’t anything to do about this. As we had no phones, we’d just have to get there when we got there. We continued to bump along on the dirt road. A banana farm materialized on our left. I glanced at the speedometer. The GPS might be ambitious about the speed of this road.

“So the guide company is called Dos Lolos?” Bryan asked as we got closer.

“Yeah. It’s not in the GPS, but Alejandro said to ask around once we get close.”

Even as I said it, it sounded unlikely to work.

I squinted out the window at the green countryside flicking by. There weren’t a lot of people around. At last, I caught sight of a couple of middle-aged men chatting next to a parked vehicle.

Bryan pulled over.

“Excuse me,” I said in Spanish. “Do you know where Dos Lolos is?”

The men looked back at us blankly.

The glowing clock on the dashboard showed we were already twenty minutes late. This wasn’t a surprise, given Alejandro’s optimism about our road speed, but the realization that we might not find Dos Lolos at all settled between us.

A brightly colored convenience store materialized in the distance. As we drew nearer, the green one-story with a metal roof and cheerful red lettering came into focus. I took a deep breath. “Let’s try again.”

This time, the woman at the counter considered us for a long moment before her eyes became very bright. “Ah! You want Don Lolo. Yes, he’s around the corner. The blue building.”

Don Lolo turned out to be a kindly man with bushy white eyebrows and a matching mustache. His eyes crinkled in a smile as we apologized profusely for being an hour late.

Don Lolo at Caño Negro

I later learned that “lolo” means “teenager.” I’d been stopping passersby to ask if they had seen dos lolos, or two teenagers. No wonder they were confused!

We learned a lot about wildlife from Don Lolo that day. He steered our boat deftly through the brown waters of the Caño Negro swamp, pointing out egrets and iguanas and caiman—alligator-like creatures that rested, very still, along the banks of the water. Bryan says he saw three giant fish as big as he is, though curiously I didn’t see any of those.

That day I also learned the importance of listening very carefully to verbal directions in a second language. And I learned a new word, lolo.